Pubs are communal living rooms; a home from home where people from all walks of life congregate to share one common interest – booze.
It sounds like a simple affair, and it should be, but just as some things have no business being in your living room (i.e. a horse, the cast of The Lion King) there are things which have no place in the pub.
Here are the top pub-based annoyances that we’d like to see banned in our favourite boozers.
Ordering a meal at a crowded bar
When it’s 9pm on a Friday, there are no seats in the pub, and the queue for the bar is stretching out of the door then the last thing anyone should be doing is ordering a three course meal from the bartender.
Loud sugar-crazed kids
By all means bring your kids in for a meal through the day (if you must), just don’t feed them six pints of Coke and a chocolate cake and then let them run around the place like Usain Bolt with Tourette's.
Expensive bar snacks
You’re half-cut and hungry. You’ve already paid in excess of twenty quid for a few beers, the last thing you want to do now is have to take a mortgage out on an artisan sausage roll.
Perpetually angry lunatics
If you can’t handle someone so much as breathing in your general direction without wanting to punch the lips clean off their face then you should be in therapy, not the pub. A few pints of fizzy lager is most certainly not the answer.
Striking up conversations at the urinal
Nothing screams nutcase like striking up a conversation about Brexit with your flies unzipped and your flaccid penis in your hand while standing directly next to another man. For the full house, make eye contact too. Everyone loves a bit of eye contact at the urinal.
Skipping queues
Surely the most quintessentially un-British thing it is humanly possible to do is to skip a queue in a pub. Nevertheless those who deem it acceptable behaviour walk freely among us.
Ordering cocktails
If you want some sort of fluorescent pink concoction with a decorative umbrella poking out of the top that takes half an hour to make then there is a place for that. It’s called a cocktail bar. This is a pub, we drink beer here.
Ordering coffees at a busy bar
In much the same way that there are purpose built places to get cocktails from, the same is true for coffee. If it’s after 9pm and the bar is heaving then you’re not going to be winning any mates by ordering 8 cappuccinos.
Not getting change from a fiver
There are few things more irritating than buying one pint from the bar, having a crisp fiver in your hand all ready to pay, only for the barmaid to announce “that’ll be £5.25 please.” It’s a scenario that Londoners will be particularly familiar with.
Inappropriate jukebox selections
When it's peak time on a busy Saturday night and everyone's having a great time forgetting about work and getting merry, no one wants to be brought back down to earth by Radiohead's entire discography seeping out of the speakers.
Bandit vultures
No one likes a guy who makes his living loitering around beside the fruitys, waits until you've poured twenty quid into it and given up, then proceeds to drop the jackpot with a single spin. Get it banned!
Music while the football is on
When the pub's full of blokes in football shirts all staring at the big screen it should be fairly obvious that they're not there for an album listening party. if the football's on, the music goes off. Simple as that.
Having to sell a kidney for a game of pool
Anywhere over a quid for a game of pool is absolute robbery in our opinion, and if you don't think it is then what are you doing in the pub? You should be off drinking Cristal on your super-yacht in the Caribbean.
Abandoning the pub in favour of the pavement
There's nothing worse than a pub with no atmosphere, but that's exactly what we're treated too on Friday evenings when for some unfathomable reason everybody decides that the pavement outside is the place to be.
Obnoxious non-locals in your local boozer
You're local boozer should be a safe haven, away from the stresses of day to day life. Not a place where you need your ear plugs to block out the noise of a 15 strong group of raucous out-of-towners.
Sparse toilet signage
In order to avoid embarrassing situations it's extremely important to have the proper signage on toilet doors. It's also important to have signs pointing the loos so that we don't have to do ten laps of the pub just to find them.
Vapers
It's great that you've quit smoking but if you're going to insist on puffing away at that ridiculous light-up techno-fag thing then please be kind enough to take yourself outside.
Mobile phones at the pub quiz
Anyone guilty of this is seriously missing the point of the pub quiz. Everyone can see you, you're ruining everybody's fun and you're making yourself look a complete cheat.
Miserable landlords
If the guy who owns the place is sick of his life then how can he expect his punters to be any different. Cheer up mate, you work in the place where most of us would like to spend our time all day, every day.
Clearing away unfinished pints
Dear bartender, it's highly likely that the pint you just swiped from the table cost over five pounds. That means that the portion you have just decided wasn't going to get finished probably cost around fifty pence. Leave the glass until it's finished or leave fifty pence in its place.
Pints with no head
There's nothing worse than finishing a long day at work and heading to the pub, gasping for a pint, only to be presented with a dead, flat pint with no fizz and zero head. It's not much to ask for really.
Staff not paying attention to who's next at the bar
Few things rattle us more than waiting fifteen minutes to be served at a horrifically busy bar, only to be ignored time after time for people who arrived at the bar in the last 10 seconds.
Screaming babies
We've mentioned kids, and we can put up with them to an extent as long as it's during the day and they're not running riot and winding everyone up. What we can not put up with however, is screaming babies. The pub is no place for your infant, that should be pretty obvious.
Wanky decor
A pub should be decked out to look like a pub. It should not be decked out like the following: An american diner; a 1920s speakeasy in New York; a Guatemalan mud hut; an abandoned train station, etc. We blame the hipsters.
Round skippers
You all know the type. Every group of mates has one, or if you're really unlucky, several. He's the guy who is quite happy to get the drinks bought for him but when it's approaching his round he makes his excuses and leaves. If you don't know somebody like this then perhaps it's you. In which case, sort it out.
Questionable urinal choice
You enter the men’s room. There are three urinals in a row. A fellow pub-goer is already using one of them. What do you do? If you answered “I’d use the one right next to the other bloke of course” then please remove yourself from the pub.
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